Another modest proposal

[Kim.fateman at Berkeley]

I tend to read these messages and then throw them out, but I think dlw
is wrong to say that Masinter's proposal forbids using full ascii in
portable code.  Just that the part that gets described in the yellow pages,
the interface, must be in lower case.  This can be accomplished by various
forms of synonymy (e.g. (putd 'foo(getd 'Foo)) to be crude).

The alternative which some people favor,
seems to be to throw away about half the useful characters,
and ignore the precedent from mathematics (which typically uses upper and
lower cases, plus Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, plus tilde's asterisks, subscripts,
superscripts).

In the spirit of this latter proposal, I suggest throwing away the characters
I,l,O,0,\,`,|,',/, because they obviously contribute to confusion;
I propose making the keys normally ascribed to 9 and 0 used
for ( and ) respectively, eliminating the need to shift.
Numbers can be written in octal, so 9 is unnecessary.  The absense of the 0
can be remedied by a set of sequence-shifting operations on strings of digits.